I had so much fun with yesterday’s Ghost of Christmas Past that I decided, “Why not see how Sabrina celebrated Christmas the next year?”
She celebrated it by accidentally casting a spell that made the entire world forget about Christmas! Agck!
Christmas Amnesia originally aired on December 11th, 1998.
For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take look at the film that the Academy named the best picture of 2006, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.
The Departed takes the plot of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and transports it to Boston. For years, crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) has ruled South Boston with an iron fist. However, police Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his assistant, Sgt. Dignan (Mark Wahlberg) think that they have finally found a way to take Costello down. They recruit police academy trainee Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to go undercover and infiltrate Costello’s organization. To help establish his cover, Costigan drops out of the academy and does time in prison on a fake assault charge.
Meanwhile, Costello has an agent of his own. Years earlier, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) was specifically recruited and trained by Costello to become a mole inside the Massachusetts State Police. Sullivan soon finds himself also working under Queenan.
While the amoral Sullivan finds it easy to deal with his dual role of being both a cop and a criminal, the far more emotionally unstable Costigan has a much more difficult time of it. Not helping is the fact that Costello turns out to be a legitimate madman who spends half of his time dismembering people and the other half serving as a secret informant to the FBI. While Sullivan smoothly works his way up the ranks, Costigan pops pills and becomes more and more paranoid.
Eventually, both Costigan and Sullivan are ordered to uncover the double agents in their respective organizations. What they don’t realize is that, even as they both attempt to learn the other’s identity, they are both seeing the same woman, psychiatrist Madolyn (Vera Farmiga.)
In the scene below, which happens to be my favorite from the entire film, Costigan and Madolyn make love after Madolyn assures Costigan that she doesn’t have a cat. That makes sense when you consider that Costigan is essentially a rat.
I have to admit that, as much as I did appreciate certain parts of the film, I was still disappointed the first time I saw The Departed. It wasn’t so much that the movie itself was bad as much as it was the fact that it didn’t live up to the standard set by previous Scorsese films. The film seemed to somehow be both conventional and overly busy at the same time, with the constantly moving camera and the propulsive soundtrack feeling more like they were more the result of a director trying to be like Scorsese than Scorsese himself. While I appreciated the comedic relief of Alec Baldwin’s performance as Queenan’s rival on the force and I thought that Matt Damon made a compelling villain, both Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Sheen seemed to have been bitten by the overacting bug. It was hard not to feel somewhat disappointed that, after waiting for over three decades to be honored by the Academy, Scorsese finally won his Oscar for The Departed.
However, with subsequent viewings, The Departed has grown on me. Once I was freed up from the expectations that come from watching a Scorsese film for the first time, I was able to enjoy The Departed for what it actually was, a very well-made and entertaining crime drama that occasionally flirted with being something more.
Watching The Departed for a second time, I was better able to appreciate the sly humor of Jack Nicholson’s performance. As played by Nicholson, Frank Costello becomes both the devil incarnate and a somewhat pathetic relic who is incapable of understanding that his time has passed. Watching Nicholson for a second time also led to me better appreciating Martin Sheen’s performance. Since Nicholson and Sheen are meant to the equivalent of the angel and the devil sitting on Damon and DiCaprio’s shoulders, it was necessary for Sheen to be as virtuous as Nicholson was demonic.
By the time that I watched The Departed for the third time, it was a lot more obvious to me that the entire film was, more or less, meant to be a satire. What Nicholson’s criminal empire and Sheen’s police force have in common is that neither one of them works the way that they’re supposed to. If there’s anything to be learned from the film, it’s that nothing means much of anything. (The Coen Brothers would be proud.)
Finally, after multiple viewings, it becomes obvious that The Departed is very much a Scorsese film. Even if his direction isn’t quite as showy as viewers have come to expect, there’s still enough little touches and details that remind us that this film was made by a master. To cite the obvious example that everyone cites, just watch for the X’s that always somehow manage to appear on the wall or the carpet before anyone in the film dies. With multiple viewings, It also became obvious to me that even if this film was set in Boston and not New York and even if the characters were Irish and not Italian, this film was still thematically pure Scorsese, dealing with themes of guilt, identity, punishment, and martyrdom.
Like all worthwhile films, The Departed is one that grows better with subsequent viewings.
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For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, let’s take a look at a German film from 2006, the Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others.
The Lives of Others takes place in 1984. Germany is split between the capitalist West and the communist East. The government of East Germany maintains its power by strictly controlling the flow of information and keeping its citizens in perpetual fear of the secret police, the Stasi.
Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch) is a successful and internationally renowned playwright, as well as being the lover of actress Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). Cultural minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme) is himself obsessed with Christa-Maria and, eager to get Dreyman out of the way, he orders the Stasi to put the playwright under surveillance.
Ambitious Stasi officer Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) is eager to pursue the assignment, seeing it as an opportunity to further his own career. However, the officer that Grubitz assigns to bug Dreyman’s apartment, Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), is less enthusiastic about investigating someone who appears to be a loyal communist. As Wiesler secretly gets to know both Dreyman and Christa, he finds himself becoming more and more disillusioned with the government that he has sworn to serve.
When Dreyman does finally decide to challenge the government (by writing an anonymous article on the high suicide rate in East Germany), Wiesler finds himself forced to decide whether to turn Dreyman in or to try to protect him.
Much like The Conversation, The Lives of Others is one of the best films ever mare about surveillance. Along with portraying, in very convincing detail, the drabness of living in a society where all thought is policed, The Lives of Others is also a portrait of people for whom a state of paranoia and fear has become the norm. The Lives Of Others may be set in the past but, considering what we now know about NSA spying, the film feels less like a history lesson and more like a very relevant statement about where we might be heading to in the future.
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In today’s Ghost of Christmas Past, Sabrina the Teenage Witch develops a case of egotitis so her aunts call upon a special person named Bob to help her with her problem. While spending the day with Bob, Sabrina discovers that Bob is better known as Santa Claus. When Bob is injured, it’s up to one teenage witch to save Christmas…
I used to love Sabrina, The Teenage Witch. Some of that was because I always wanted to be able to make things happen just by pointing her finger and saying something cute, just like Sabrina! However, most of it was because Sabrina had a talking cat.
This episode originally aired on December 19th, 1997.
Today’s Ghost of Christmas Past is a real classic and, like any classic, it’ll probably end up getting yanked off of YouTube in another week or so. So, enjoy 1964’s Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer while you still can!
(Minor Spoilers Below)
For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at one of the most disturbing films of 2012, Compliance.
Compliance opens with the dowdy and middle-aged Sandra (Ann Dowd) arriving at the fast food restaurant that she manages. Sandra, at first glance, seems to be a rather forgettable and conventional, the type of person who we see every day but don’t give much thought to. It’s only when Sandra gets a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer that we start to see the disturbing reality underneath Sandra’s perfect facade.
The man tells Sandra that one of her employees may have stolen money from a customer’s purse. He asks Sandra to detain the employee until the police arrive. Based on a vague description given by the man, Sandra decides that the employee in question must be Becky (Dreama Walker), a cashier who Sandra earlier had some conflict with.
Sandra calls Becky into her office and confronts her with the man’s accusations. When Becky denies them, the man tells Sandra to strip search Becky. Though she is initially hesitant, Sandra does perform the search and finds nothing.
However, the man isn’t finished humiliating Becky. As the man’s instructions grow more extreme and bizarre, Sandra soon starts to recruit others to help her keep Becky under watch.
Compliance is a portrait of both abusive authority and petty sadism. Dreama Walker is sympathetic as Becky while Ann Dowd turns Sandra into a frighteningly plausible monster. And, make no doubt about it, Sandra is a monster. The prank call simply gives Sandra an excuse to unleash all the resentment that she feels towards the younger and prettier Becky and it leads to a very interesting dynamic in which both the caller and Sandra become allies in a conspiracy to humiliate and, ultimately, dehumanize Becky. Throughout the film, the caller’s claims grow more and more flamboyant and we, as an audience, are forced to decide whether Sandra is genuinely fooled or if she’s just using the call as an excuse to justify acting on her own resentments.
What makes Compliance especially disturbing is that the film itself is based on a true story. Most film usually use the term “based on a true story” quite loosely but Compliance sticks very closely to the facts of something that happened in a McDonald’s in 2004. Just like in the film, a man pretending to be a police officer called the McDonald’s and told the manager that one of the cashiers was suspected of being a thief. Just as in the film, the caller ordered the cashier to be stripped naked and eventually ordered the manager’s fiancée to sexually assault the cashier.
When that incident made national news, I know that a lot of people (like me) reacted by wondering how the manager could have been so stupid and making a few jokes about the type of people who make a career out of fast food. As a society, we tend to assume that incidents like this are somehow not the norm.
However, as Compliance demonstrates, there was more to this incident than just stupidity. We are continually told that we have to automatically respect and obey anybody who presents himself as being an authority figure, whether it’s the uniformed cop who responds to any hint of dissent with either his taser or his gun or just some unseen guy on the phone who claims to be an officer of the law. We’re continually told not to question men in authority, instead we’re simply to assume that anything they say is both important and correct. As Compliance demonstrates, sadists like Sandra are not as unusual as we like to assume. They’re just doing what they’ve been bred to do.
They’re following orders and respecting authority.
They’re maintaining compliance.
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So, you knew this was going to happen.
With it being the holiday season and me sharing whatever old holiday shows that I can find on YouTube and Hulu, you knew that I was going to eventually end up sharing a Lifetime movie.
But you know what?
I love Lifetime. Lifetime makes me happy and Christmas is all about being happy!
Anyway, today’s Ghost of Christmas Past is On The 2nd Day Of Christmas, a 1997 made-for-tv movie in which a thief played by Mary Stuart Masterson is caught trying to steal at a department store. Because the holidays are so close (oh, just go with it), security guard Bert (Mark Ruffalo) agrees to be responsible for both Masterson and her niece. Romance follows.
Okay, so it’s kind of a silly movie but it’s a Christmas movie so it’s supposed to be kind of silly. Plus, Mark Ruffalo is so cute in this film!
Our latest entry into the 44 Days of Paranoia is a dark masterpiece. Based on a script by Robert Towne, directed by Roman Polanski, and starring Jack Nicholson, 1974’s Chinatown is one of the greatest films ever made.
Chinatown takes place in 1940s Los Angeles. Private Investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired by a woman (Diane Ladd) who claims that her name is Evelyn Mulwray. She wants Gittes to follow her husband, Hollis, and discover whether he’s having an affair. Gittes gets some pictures of Hollis with a young woman (Belinda Palmer) and hands them over to Evelyn.
The next day, the pictures are published on the front page of the newspaper and Gittes is confronted by another woman (Faye Dunaway) who explains that she — and not the woman who hired him — is the actual Evelyn Mulwray. Gittes then learns that Hollis has turned up dead, drowned in a reservoir.
Gittes suspects that Hollis was murdered and launches his own investigation. This eventually leads Jake to Hollis’s former business partner, Noah Cross (John Huston). Noah also happens to be the father of Evelyn and he offers double Gittes’s fee if Gittes will track down Hollis’s younger girlfriend.
As his investigation continues, Gittes discovers that Hollis’s murder was connected to both the continued growth of Los Angeles as a city and a truly unspeakable act that occurred several years in the past. Nobody, it turns out, is what he or she originally appears to be. To say anything else about the plot would be unfair to anyone who hasn’t seen Chinatown before.
Since I first started reviewing films for this site, one of the things that I’ve discovered is that it’s actually easier to review a bad film than a good film. It’s easier to be snarky and cynical about the latest film from Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich than it is to explain why a film works. There’s a famous saying about pornography: “I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it,” and sometimes that’s the way I feel whenever it comes time to try to review a great film.
Consider Chinatown. At its heart, Chinatown is an homage to the old film noirs of the 40s and 50s. Now, I have to admit that I’ve lost track of how many noir homages I’ve seen. It seems like every director has to make at least one hard-boiled, morally ambiguous detective film. Chinatown has all of the familiar elements — the hero is a private investigator, Evelyn Mulwray initially appears to be a classic femme fatale, the dialogue is appropriately cynical, and the plot is full of twist and turns. Even the film’s theme of political conspiracy serves to remind us that most noirs used their detective stories as a way to explore the hidden underbelly of American society.
And yet, with Chinatown, Polanski, Nicholson, Towne, and producer Robert Evans took all of those familiar elements and used them to create one of the greatest films ever made.
Why is Chinatown such a great film?
Some of the credit has to go to Jack Nicholson who, in the role of Jake Gittes, gives perhaps his best performance. As I mentioned above, Gittes is, in many ways, a stock character but Nicholson brings so much nuance and depth to the role that it doesn’t matter. Nicholson’s trademark cynicism and sarcasm are both to be found here but he also brings a cocky recklessness to the role. Gittes is such a charismatic and likable hero and so confident in himself that it makes the film’s ending all the more shocking.
As good as Nicholson is, he’s matched at every turn by John Huston’s Noah Cross. Noah Cross is one of the most vile characters to ever appear on-screen, which is why Huston’s rather courtly performance is all the more disturbing. When Gittes confronts Noah about the worst of his many crimes, Cross simply responds that a man is never sure what he’s capable of until he does it. Huston delivery of the lines leave us with little doubt that Noah believes every word of what he’s just said.
In the end, though, most of the credit has to go to Roman Polanski’s direction and Robert Towne’s script. Towne’s script provides a genuinely challenging and thought-provoking mystery, while Polanski’s stylish direction keeps the view continually off-balance and unsure of who is telling the truth. Reportedly, Polanski and Towne had a contentious relationship, with Polanski changing the ending of Towne’s script to make the film much more downbeat. In the end, Polanski made the right choice. The film ends the only way that it possibly could.
Or, to quote the famous line: “It’s Chinatown.”
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Today’s Ghost of Christmas Past was originally broadcast in 1952 and it’s certainly a lot more serious than anything that The Brady Bunch ever had to deal with.
In this episode of the early police procedural Dragnet, two cops search for two young boys who have disappeared on Christmas. Ominously, one of the boys has received a present — a .22 caliber rifle.
The Big .22 Rifle For Christmas was originally broadcast on December 18th, 1952 and it remains effective even 60 years later.
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, I want to take a look at John Ford’s Oscar-winning 1935 film, The Informer.
The Informer takes place in Dublin in 1921, during the Irish War of Independence and shortly before the creation of the Irish Free State. Friendly but stupid and irresponsible Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen) has been kicked out of the Irish Republican Army and is pretty much a pariah among his own people. His prostitute girlfriend, meanwhile, only wants to raise enough money to book passage for America and start a new life.
Gypo sees an opportunity when he runs into his former IRA colleague Frankie (Wallace Ford), who is one of the few people to treat Gypo kindly. Frankie is also fugitive who has a £20 bounty on his head. Gypo impulsively turns informer and lets the British know where Frankie is hiding.
When Frankie is killed, the guilt-ridden Gypo uses the reward money to buy a bottle of whiskey and then spends the rest of the day drunk and trying to convince the IRA the Frankie was betrayed by a nonexistent man named Mulligan.
When it was initially released in 1935, The Informer did well with both audiences and critics. It was nominated for Best Picture and won Oscars for John Ford, Victor McLaglen, and screenwriter Dudley Nichols. However, when viewed today, it’s easy to see the flaws in The Informer. The film feels stagey, heavy-handed, and rather melodramatic.
And yet, with all that in mind, I still like The Informer.
Some of that, of course, is because it’s a film about Ireland and, specifically, it’s a film about how the Irish Catholics were oppressed by British occupiers. This is a topic that I find to be endlessly fascinating and, speaking a someone who still has family living in Ardglass, County Down, I have to admit that I have a weakness for films (like this one) which tend to take the Irish side of things.
On a technical level, John Ford’s direction holds up pretty well. There’s a few scenes where the story’s theatricality gets the better of him but, for the most part, Ford does a good job of capturing Gypo’s dreary existence and maintaining a level of suspense, despite the fact that Gypo’s fate is obvious to the audience long before it’s obvious to anyone in the film. In Ford’s hands, the fog-filled and shadowy streets of Dublin serve as a representation of Gypo’s increasingly desperate and paranoid mindset. Ford’s Dublin is a world where danger can come out of nowhere and where there’s no place for a big and stupid target like Gypo to hide.
The film is dominated by Victor McLaglen’s theatrical performance. Again, there a few moments where McLaglen’s performance is a bit too broad but, for the most part, his boisterous approach works will for his well-meaning but not too smart character. One can see not only why the film’s characters are weary of Gypo but also why they have a difficult time rejecting him all together.
The Informer may not be perfect but it’s still worth tracking down and seeing.
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